Letters to the Editors: Parents just don't understand

Letters to the Editors: Parents just don't understand

March 9th, 2012 in Opinion Letters

Parents just don't understand

Re: "Parents protest at school offices" (March 7). Hamilton County School Superintendent Rick Smith had told these protesting parents that they have no say in the school redistricting and that he would not be available to them.

They evidently do not understand their responsibility in our political system, i.e.: Pay your taxes. Sit down. Shut up.

JAMES R. HILL

Red Bank

Circus animals a form of slavery

I am absolutely heartsick at the thought of another circus performance coming to Chattanooga. It makes me cringe to see the advertisement for it on TV. These animals running around in a circle over and over again. These poor creatures were never meant to do that.

These animals are threatened, poked and terrorized to make them stand on their back legs and do all kinds of stupid tricks to entertain us humans. It's another form of slavery.

Won't you readers please take pity on these helpless creatures, and refuse to buy tickets to this circus.

MARGARET PETERS

Ringgold, Ga.

Court is an option in birth-control tiff

I predict a fifth option the Catholic institutions have that probably will happen if the administration does not back down from ObamaCare's contraception requirement.

That will be to fight the requirement in the courts. This unfortunately will incur expenses for both the Catholic institutions trying to protect their rights and the government trying to take them away.

By not funding birth control, religious organizations are not depriving anyone's access to birth control. This important concept merits repeating. No one's rights are violated. By not funding birth control, religious organizations are not depriving anyone's access to birth control. One within a religious organization can still obtain birth control; they just have to use other means to pay for it.

However, providing birth control is mandated, every religious organization that has a moral issue with it is having its constitutional right of freedom of religion stomped upon.

DEAN YANKAUSKAS

Hixson

Extend courtesy in disagreements

The Christianity that I try to practice (sometimes failing, of course) is founded on the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus discuss sexuality or birth control. He does support the separation of church and state, and history proves Him correct, as always.

All people are to treated with love and respect.

The message coming from people having political meetings in churches, constantly concerned with sex and teaching hatred, seems to have a perverted form of Christianity, not unlike the extremists in the Arab world.

This may be religion, but it is hard to prove it is Christian.

I feel no hatred for them, just concern about the country they envision.

Could they possibly extend the same courtesy to the ones who disagree with them?

PAT PANTER

Soddy-Daisy

Defend property values at meeting

City Councilman Jack Benson said that if County Trustee Bill Hullander's son is able to get his property rezoned at East Brainerd and Panorama roads, then both sides of East Brainerd will go commercial from Gunbarrel Road to Interstate 75.

The City Council is set to vote on that rezoning, with much opposition from neighbors, 6 p.m., March 13.

It should have been illegal for Bill Hullander to vote (as a planning commissioner) to zone high-density apartments next door to his family's lots, on the same block as his business, Hullco. But they want more. They want to bulldoze two beautiful homes in our neighborhood, and grade our hill, to install a 20,000-square-foot strip mall with more than 100 parking spaces.

Until neighbors unite and organize, the Planning Commission will continue to degrade our property values and our neighborhoods so insider politicians and developers can make a short-term profit off us.

This brazen insider dealing is making select people rich, and the rest of the community poor.

I hope you agree our neighborhood is worth defending, our traffic is already too dangerous, and the rezonings are getting too gaudy, and join us in defending all our property values March 13.

LANA SUTTON

Littlefield failed to keep promise

Although Mayor Ron Littlefield stood before our City Council and promised to invite Westside residents to a meeting to discuss the future of our community, no one from Gateway Towers was invited.

I think his failure to keep his promise to us was intentional and disrespected the residents of the Towers, whom I serve as the president of their tenants' association.

He should have impressed upon the members of his staff or the employees of the Chattanooga Housing Authority, or whomever he engaged to distribute his invitations door-to-door, that every residence in the Westside should receive one. Evidently, he did not, which to me is a clear indication of his lack of administrative skills and a probable cause of the dangerous condition of Boynton Drive and the noxious vapors that rise from our downtown sewers.

KARL E. KENDRICK

Plan would stunt Howard's progress

Thank you, David Cook, for "Sit-ins all over again!" (March 1 column). As an alumna of Howard High, a former cheerleader and 1960s-1970s civil rights activist, I am glad that you see the connection and the dream that led us into the streets and continues academically at Howard today. Too long it has been pushed under the pillow by selfish individualism.

Yes, there is a lack of physical space for education in the suburbs, especially East Hamilton, where middle-class folks followed the advice of land developers and real estate brokers and purchased homes near "good schools" in "safe neighborhoods." They fled the city, but poor families remained and rebuilt its schools and the Westside. Now our Howard High School with a K-12 vertical future is the envy of people in the know.

So it is no wonder that Mayor Littlefield and Purpose Built "consultants" from Atlanta want to take over the school by reducing truly upward mobile poor kids out of Howard High School's zone by tearing down the sturdy and safe College Hill Courts on the Westside and replace it with gentrified housing. So poor kids will then be crammed into the less than adequate suburban Hamilton County schools.

GLORIA J. GRIFFITH

Obedience to Allah supercedes reason

I suppose most of us do not care about what happened in Afghanistan recently.

Inadvertently, the burning of the Quran, destroying material from a detention facility and the irrational and disgusting response that followed, causing 40 people to be murdered -- including six American soldiers.

How long will it take us to learn the problem in Afghanistan is Islam?

The Muslims rely on blind faith and the uncritical acceptance of the text on which their religion is based!

Maybe we should admire their commitment to blind faith, or maybe we should be ashamed of our timidity to uphold our principles of freedom of speech.

Our president and politicians are uniting to restrain free speech lest they should hurt the Muslim's feelings. Instead they apologize.

For Muslims, obeying Allah is more important than human reason, fearing that it should lead them astray from the truth of revelation. Their divine inspiration, obedience to Allah supersedes reason! In the last 10 years we have been afraid to speak up and tell the truth that the religion of the people of Afghanistan is infected with intellectual dishonesty. Until we admit that, there will be neither freedom nor peace.